Home > Nordic’s Bluetooth Low Energy Team Nominated ‘Design Team of the Year’

Nordic’s Bluetooth Low Energy Team Nominated ‘Design Team of the Year’

Ultra low power (ULP) RF specialist Nordic Semiconductor ASA today announces that the design team behind the development of its µBlue™ nRF8001 Bluetooth low energy solution has been nominated 'Design Team of the Year' in the prestigious 2011 Annual Creativity in Electronics (ACE) awards. The awards are organized by leading U.S. electronics design title EE Times.

The EE Times ACE Awards program - judged by EE Times editors and a distinguished independent judging panel comprising leading voices from academia and industry, and Wall Street executives - is one of the world's leading electronics industry recognition events designed to honor the people and companies behind the technologies that are changing the way we work, live, and play.

There are four other finalists in the 2011 Design Team of the Year category including U.S-headquartered companies Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, and Intel Corporation, plus Israel-headquartered PrimeSense. The winner will be announced on May 3rd at an Awards Event held during the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) Silicon Valley in San Jose, California.

The release of the Nordic µBlue™ nRF8001 represents the culmination of six years and 150,000 man-hours of research and development work by a team of 100 software and hardware engineers.

“Nordic has a heritage of designing ULP wireless devices,” explains David Engelien-Lopes, Nordic Project Manager for the nRF8001. “However, this was the first time the design team had embarked on a project to develop a ULP transceiver complying with the Bluetooth v4.0 specification. In fact, at the time, it was the first time any design team in the world had embarked on such a project.”

Nordic has been at the forefront of the group that defined the Bluetooth low energy specification (now a hallmark of the latest Bluetooth v4.0 specification) since becoming a foundation member of Nokia’s Wibree Alliance in 2006 (the Alliance became part of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) in June 2007).

Nordic contributed decades of expertise gained in producing successive generations of class-leading proprietary and interoperable (ANT/ANT+) products within a field it pioneered: ULP wireless connectivity solutions that can be powered by batteries as small as coin cells and operate for many months or years (dependent on the specific application and typical duty cycle).

“The µBlue nRF8001 represents six years of commitment to a challenging project that began when Nordic embarked on the development of Wibree which then became Bluetooth low energy," comments Geir Langeland, Nordic Semiconductor's Director of Sales & Marketing. "To see this commitment recognized by such a prestigious judging panel is an honor. I am especially pleased for the development team because I know how hard and for how long they have worked - until now with little public recognition - to earn this acknowledgment."